San Pedro la Laguna, Guatemala (Part 1)

Living with locals for the week and getting fully immersed in the Spanish language. What a week, and another highlight for us, (yeah I know, everything seems like a highlight recently!) I did say that Guatemala is becoming a favourite and this still stands true, if not more so now.

The Fantastic Five has become the Fantastic Four, even after a slightly muddled series of flights home for Scotty but he got there eventually! The rest of us set in for a much shorter journey to Lago de Atitlán (Lake Atitlán) - about 4 hours west of Antigua. It wouldn't be a journey in a third world country without some sort of problem; this time it was thick fog to the point of not even being able to see 10m in front, followed by a series of hairpin bends (complete with sheer drops on one side) from the mountains down to the lakeside. Not gonna lie, I was pretty close to slapping the girl next to me on the bus who was screaming/gasping almost obnoxiously, on every corner. Never fear, we all made it in one piece to our home for the next week, San Pedro la Laguna. And with that, Mike and I have come to the realisation that after probably about 70 hours of travel, we are now only 400km away from San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico - a month later! And that's how you do one seriously large loop.

Lago de Atitlán is similar to Lake Taupo in that it was formed following a huge volcanic eruption 85,000 years ago that blew volcanic ash as far as Florida and Panama. Today it is surrounded by other smaller volcanoes and hills which along with the altitude, provide great conditions for growing coffee and corn.

I'm not sure what we were expecting of San Pedro itself, but it was almost the polar opposite of the colonial buildings and cobblestoned streets of Antigua. Set on the edge of the lake and heading up into the hills, the buildings were a mixture of concrete and corrugated iron, tightly packed in together with tiny wee alleyways that sometimes even one of the many tuktuks couldn't fit through, plus hundreds of power lines overhead. In some parts, it was almost what I would imagine the slums of India to be like. It's a relatively small town, approximately 14,000 residents.

Our primary reason for visiting San Pedro was to enrol in some Spanish classes and to stay with local families in a homestay situation in order to be fully immersed in the language and the local life for the week. Cat and Rich stayed with the family who owned the Language school we went to and Mike and I stayed with another family about 5 minutes walk away.

The González family who we stayed with were absolutely lovely and they didn't speak any English apart from knowing the odd word, like potato! It was a good incentive for us to have to try harder to communicate and to practice our spanish, especially after being a bit slack with it for the last couple of weeks. The family was young - the father Chema just 33, the mum Conchita 29 and they had three children - Felix (11), Tina (10) and Andréa (8 months). Chema works picking coffee beans and corn, depending on what time of year it is and Conchita as a housewife, a very good one at that! Conchita prepared us three meals a day, eaten seated at the table with the family which gave us the opportunity to try many different types of traditional Guatemalan food and practice our Spanish.

We chose a small independent school called Guatemaya Spanish School for our lessons for the week. There were only 4 teachers, so Cat and I had a teacher each and the boys shared another. Our school was essentially outside, a series of four different platforms scattered up the hill so we each had our own space to learn, overlooking the lake, for four hours each morning. I thoroughly enjoyed the 10 minute walk to and from school each day and being able to watch the locals go about their daily routines. Seeing the young kids heading to school, walking past the markets where the women would be setting up their stalls to sell their fresh fruit and veges for the day and the local basketball court where there would always be loads of kids playing many different games of football at once. Each day's lessons were punctuated by a wee break or "la pausa" where we had a variety of morning tea snacks. The peak was definitely day one where we had pastries filled with banana but this also falsely raised our hopes for subsequent days. Guatemalans have a great sense of humour so our teachers frequently enjoyed messing with us and what we were eating. For example, cochitas which are sort of dough balls filled with meat and sauce that they tried to tell us was cat and telling us that they bought tortillas filled with chocolate, which actually turned out to be filled with beans. Rough!

While obviously you can't learn Spanish in a week (if only), we have progressed from Rich just adding "o" to the end of every word to make it sound Spanish - to drowning in hundreds of verbs, verb conjugations and various phrases. I've found I can definitely understand a lot more now, or at least get the gist of what someone is saying, but knowing how to respond and remembering the words to use back is much harder.

We wanted to stay and learn more, to the point that we were seriously considering skipping El Salvador and potentially Nicaragua as well... but all good things must come to an end. Even though we've only been here a week, it feels much longer and it's been really lovely to have a family for the week - even if we didn't always understand each other! Mike and I found ourselves constantly feeling guilty that we didn't know the words for things we wanted to say to our family but we tried our best with a dictionary on hand to fill in the gaps. The family were very patient with us and the way they welcomed us into their home and their lives was amazing and it's been awesome to experience life as they do.

I'm going to have to split this blog in two as there's not enough space for the photos and otherwise this will be an essay and a half. So hold that thought...Read more